Leading pan-African telecoms group, Liquid Telecom, and Telecom Egypt, Egypt's first integrated telecom operator, have signed a memorandum of understanding The signing ceremony was witnessed by the Minister of Investment Cooperation Sahar Nast and the Minister of communication and information technology, Amr Talaat. The MoU aims to enhance cooperation in three fields namely establishing data centres, infrastructure and developing financial inclusion applications. The MOU was signed by the CEO of Telecom Egypt, Ahmed Al Beheiry and Liquid Telecom CEO, Nic Rudnick on the sidelines of Africa 2018. The agreement includes a partnership between Telecom Egypt and Africa Data Centres, a subsidiary of Liquid, to build and operate new data centres across Egypt. The partnership is expected to add new data centre capacities to meet the increasing growth of the Egyptian ICT sector. Telecom Egypt will use the network to connect Egyptian businesses to the rest of Africa, whilst also partnering with Liquid Telecom to build data centres across Egypt. Following an initial investment of $50m in data centres and cloud services, Liquid Telecom plans to invest an additional $350m in broadband and financial inclusion initiatives, as well as high capacity data centres. A data centre planned to be built in Cairo will be connected to facilities in other countries to form the "largest network of telecommunication centres in Africa. "Expanding the Africa Data Centres brand into North Africa for the first time signifies our intention to be a truly pan-African data centre provider," Rudnick said
